Ord Drive by A21 is, at its core, a project about clarity – of plan, of outlook and of intention. Set on a high plain east of Boulder, Colorado, the 1970s ranch arrived with good bones and a site doing the heavy lifting: a wide, west-facing panorama taking in the Flatirons and the Continental Divide. For architect Joey Pruett, the ambition was never to out-muscle the landscape, but to let it set the tone.
“The site was fantastic,” Pruett recalls. “It’s east of Boulder, on kind of a high ridge top overlooking the Flatirons to the west.” Even in a home that required significant repair, that view offered a simple directive. “It was really just that view and that horizontal sky and the mountains. So I just stood there, and I was like, ‘How do we make this kind of the moment of the house?’”
The answer was a complete interior renovation that opened the living spaces and re-orientated daily life toward the western edge. A large wall of glazing now stretches across the rear elevation, lifting daylight deep into the plan and framing a constant relationship to the shifting weather and landscape beyond.
To achieve that scale of opening while maintaining performance in Boulder’s demanding climate, the team specified the Marvin Ultimate collection. “The challenge was finding a product where we could open up that whole backside of the house with floor-to-ceiling windows to get a connection between those views and the interior spaces.” It was a decision shaped by pragmatism as well as precision. “This wasn’t an unlimited budget project,” he notes. “So we needed a window system that delivered real performance and clean detailing without compromising the overall vision – and Marvin gave us that confidence.”
In a geography defined by extremes, performance was non-negotiable. “Boulder is very strict on its climate regulations. You almost have to over-engineer all of your building products,” with elements having to withstand winds of “either 155 or 165 miles per hour”. With the Marvin Ultimate collection, the architecture holds its line: refined detailing, robust thermal and structural performance, with openings large enough to make the landscape feel stitched into the home.
At handover, the project came full circle. “I was standing out on the deck looking at that view watching the sunset,” Pruett says. “And it was just a feeling of immense proudness, happy that the clients were happy.” For a home that began with a view, Ord Drive ends the same way – made lighter, calmer and more open, with the Marvin Ultimate collection helping translate an ambitious vision into something lived-in and enduring.
